2016 Quick Candidate Profile – Marco Rubio

We continue our tour of the wingnut side of the Republican party with a stop to take a look at Marco Rubio.

Rubio is a freshman senator from Miami, proving yet again that apparently every argument against Barack Obama as a candidate (his lack of experience) was total disingenuous crap. Rubio the second candidate with Cuban roots and is brought forth to us by one of the wackiest political states in the nation and home of the infamous hanging chads.

He’s a fan of smaller government, having supported a bill that would have left 10% of government positions unfilled through attrition. And yet, his argument against the sequestration bill was that defense spending should not have been linked to such a plan.

Representing the far right of the party, he’s obviously anti-abortion, against gay marriage, opposed to gun control, and voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act primarily based on the grounds that the money would be taken from other domestic violence and state-operated crime-fighting funding.

He’s pro-flat tax, opposes the capital gains tax (saying it’s taxing the same dollars twice), and opposes an increased minimum wage in favor of a kind of convoluted plan to offer tax breaks to certain low-wage earners working in qualifying low-wage jobs…Because he doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t live on $18,000 any more, let alone support a family.

Rubio is not the rabble-rouser that Ted Cruz or Rand Paul are, but that probably doesn’t make him much more palatable to the power-controlling centrists of the party leadership. But what is interesting is that his views are fairly similar to both Cruz and Paul, which will make for some interesting debates between the Republican candidates, and curious decisions to be made by the primary voters. Because if nothing else, we’ve seen that the Republicans have proven themselves to be particularly adept at ripping their party apart lately.